General Michael S. Davison, USA (Ret.), Arlington, Virginia
Richard P. DeMarco, North Royalton, Ohio
Colonel James A. Donovan, USMC (Ret.), Atlanta, Georgia
Ed W. Eaton, Walla Walla, Washington
Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell, USA (Ret.), Fort Belvoir, Virginia
Lieutenant Colonel James Fitter, USA (Ret.), Fairfax, Virginia
Thomas R. Hargrove, Galveston, Texas
William J. Houser, Hinsdale, Illinois
Major General Kenneth J. Houghton, USMC (Ret.), La Jolla, California
First Lieutenant Peter Joannides, USA (Ret.), McLean, Virginia
Lieutenant General William K. Jones, USMC (Ret.), Alexandria, Virginia
Brigadier General Frederick J. Karch, USMC (Ret.), Arlington, Virginia
First Lieutenant David Kasten, USA, Glendale, Arizona
General P. X. Kelley, USMC (Ret.), Arlington, Virginia
General Walter T. Kerwin Jr., USA (Ret.), Alexandria, Virginia
General Frederick J. Kroesen, USA (Ret.), Falls Church, Virginia
Ed Kugler, Spring, Texas
Major Jim Land, USMC (Ret.), Woodbridge, Virginia
Lieutenant Colonel James W. Lanning, USA (Ret.), San Marcos, Texas
Bill Laurie, Mesa, Arizona
H. R. (Lefty) Luster, Naturita, California
Major General S. H. Matheson, USA (Ret.), Carmel, California
Lieutenant General William J. McCaffrey, USA (Ret.), Alexandria, Virginia
JoAnna M. McDonald, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Mike Monfrooe, Bemidji, New Mexico
Jack Murphy, Croydon, Pennsylvania
Lieutenant General Herman Nickerson Jr., USMC (Ret.), Jacksonville, North Carolina
Major Willis L. Powell, USA (Ret.), Columbus, Georgia
Donn R. Proven, Glenview, Illinois
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Reid, USMC (Ret.), Fallbrook, California
Rick Reynolds, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Lieutenant General Elvy B. Roberts, USA (Ret.), San Francisco, California
Terry B. Roderick, Cocoa, Florida
General W. B. Rosson, USA (Ret.), Salem. Virginia
Ray Sautter, Long Beach, California
Captain Scott R. Schoner, USA. Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Lieutenant General Ormond R. Simpson, USMC (Ret.), Bryan, Texas
Gary Smith, Perrin, Texas
James W. Sotherland, Glen Allen, Virginia
Major General Paul F. Smith, USA (Ret.), Melbourne, Florida
Lawrence W. Tahler, Whitefish, Montana
Brigadier General Joseph R. Ulatoski, USA (Ret.), Bellevue, Washington
Joseph T. Ward, Lafayette, Colorado
Ray Weiner, Roselle, Illinois
General William C. Westmoreland, USA (Ret.), Charleston, South Carolina
General Fred C. Weyand, USA (Ret.), Honolulu, Hawaii
Gary M. White, Phoenix, Arizona
Colonel Nevin Williams, USA (Ret.), Carmichael, California
Major General Ellis W. Williamson, USA (Ret.), Arlington, Virginia
Darryl Young, Carmel, California
Archives, Museums, Libraries, Installations
The staffs of the following assisted in the search for documents and provided papers and other information that contributed to this study:
Don R. Pratt Museum, Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Department of the Army, General Officer Management Office, Washington, D.C.
Department of the Navy, Office of Information, Washington, D.C.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, California
Pentagon Library, Washington, D.C.
Phoenix Public Library, Phoenix, Arizona
Public Affairs Office, Fort Campbell, Kentucky
Public Affairs Office, Fort Benning, Georgia
Public Affairs Office, NAB Coronado, California
Public Affairs Office, Quantico, Virginia
Public Affairs Office, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii
Redcatcher, Inc., McLean, Virginia
Scottsdale Public Library, Scottsdale, Arizona
Southwest Business, Industry, and Rehabilitation Association, Phoenix, Arizona
U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit, Fort Benning, Georgia
U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania
U.S. Army Public Affairs Office, Washington, D.C.
U.S. Army Recruiting Command, Phoenix, Arizona
U.S. Marine Corps Public Affairs, Washington, D.C.
U.S. Marine Corps Museum and Library, Washington, D.C.
U.S. Marine Corps Recruiting Station, Phoenix, Arizona
U.S. Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia
U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland
Other Books by Michael Lee Lanning
THE ONLY WAR WE HAD: A Platoon Leader’s Journal of Vietnam
VIETNAM 1969–1970: A Company Commander’s Journal
INSIDE THE LRRPS: Rangers in Vietnam
INSIDE FORCE RECON: Recon Marines in Vietnam (with Ray W. Stubbe)
THE BATTLES OF PEACE
INSIDE THE VC AND THE NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces (with Dan Cragg)
VIETNAM AT THE MOVIES
SENSELESS SECRETS: The Failures of U.S. Military Intelligence
THE MILITARY 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Military Leaders of All Time
THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN SOLDIER: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell
BLOOD WARRIORS: American Military Elites
MERCENARIES: Soldiers of Fortune, from Ancient Greece to Today’s Private Military Companies
About the Author
Michael Lee Lanning retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel after more than twenty years’ service. During his assignment to Vietnam, he served as both an infantry platoon leader and a company commander in the 199th Infantry Brigade (Light). He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Copyright
A Presidio Press Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Lee Lanning
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Presidio Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
PRESIDIO PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83312-9
www.presidiopress.com
v3.1
Footnotes
1
The Marine Corps and the army trained recruits with M14s early in the war and with M16s later in the conflict. Although the ranges (50–500 meters), firing positions, and the number of rounds fired (40–80) varied with the service and the time period, generally, shooters whose hits totaled 90 percent qualified as expert; those who scored 75–89 percent qualified as sharpshooter; and those who scored 60–74 percent qualified as marksman.
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2
A Starlight scope is an electronic-image intensifier that uses reflected light from the stars or moon to identify targets. For additional information see Chapter 10 “Tools of the Trade: Arms and Equipment.”
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3
Motion pictures, novels, and even a few nonfiction books have portrayed Vietnam snipers routinely acting alone, without communications, and far from friendly lines. While good fiction, these stories are simply not true of actual sniper operations in Southeast Asia.
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4
An M21 is a modified 7.62mm M14 rifle that served as the army’s standard sniper weapon system during the war. For additional information see Chapter 10 “Tools of the Trade: Weapons and Equipment” and Appendix A “Sniper Rifle Systems Used in Vietnam.”
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5
All of these dates are, of course, approximate and dependent on subseq
uent archaeological discoveries. Also, the use of weapons and metals in one part of the world does not indicate that they were universal. For instance, the use of iron did not reach Africa until centuries after iron became common in Europe, and iron did not penetrate the New World until introduced to it by European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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6
Advances in artillery weapons paralleled those of muskets and rifles so that by the seventeenth century artillery shared equal status with the infantry and cavalry on the battlefield.
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7
Precise credit for individual shots in the Revolutionary War was as difficult to accurately confirm as it would be in future conflicts. None of the limited accounts of the time about the battle mention Murphy as the person who fired the shot that killed Frazer. However, Murphy claimed the kill, and several of his fellow riflemen confirmed that it was his shot that brought down the general.
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8
The literal translation of jaeger is “hunter.”
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9
Guillemard certainly deserves credit for the shot that killed Lord Nelson. However, it is interesting to note that, with the ships locked together, the French marksman’s range to target was at most forty to fifty feet.
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10
The marksmanship of the Kentucky riflemen on Lake Erie and at New Orleans virtually renamed the weapon; no longer called the “Pennsylvania rifle,” it was now the “Kentucky rifle.”
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11
Unfortunately, the casualties on both sides were for naught. The United States and Great Britain had signed the Treaty of Ghent to end the war on December 24, 1814, but slow communications did not bring the news to New Orleans until after the battle.
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12
The Confederacy stockpiled many U.S. weapons prior to its secession and captured more in the early months of the war. Confederates also took over the gun-making machinery at Harpers Ferry and moved it to Fayetteville. North Carolina, where James H. Button, the former master armorer at the Federal gun works, became the superintendent of Confederate armories. The only way the Southern-made weapons differed from the North’s rifled muskets was the “CSA” (rather than “USA”) stamp on the rifles’ lock plates.
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13
The word sharpshooter did not evolve from the Sharps rifle. The first written reference to a sharpshooter appears in an 1802 English dictionary description of Austrian infantry. By the height of the Napoleonic Wars, a decade later, the term “sharpshooter” had become common in most armies. By the time of the American Civil War, its use was so prevalent that Berdan’s Union regiments readily adopted the description.
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14
Telescopic sights were first made in England about 1640 and in Germany almost immediately thereafter. Their first use in extended combat, however, did not occur until both sides employed scopes with two or three times amplification power in the American Civil War.
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15
Regardless of the degree of truth about Dixon’s shot, the fact that the story exists provides an indication of the accuracy attributed to the buffalo guns and the hunters who used them.
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16
Neither of these stories can be confirmed. It is interesting to note that the article shared space in the newspaper with an advertisement for Reichert telescopic sights, to which both snipers credited their success. Confirming sniper kills, whether during World War I or in subsequent conflicts, proved to be extremely difficult, and any claim of an exact sniper count should be looked upon with some skepticism.
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17
The document itself is undated and few copies have survived. According to the “Date Received” stamp on the front of the copy on file in the Marine Corps Museum in Washington. D.C., it arrived there on November 12, 1942.
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18
The last two paragraphs of the letter provide an interesting insight into the early use of sniper rifles by the U.S. Navy. According to the quartermaster general’s letter, the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance. on April 14, 1945, requested “400 rifles fitted with telescopes for use in minesweeping operations.”
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19
A good insight into the army’s official view of snipers, and perhaps a look at its control over “unofficial” publications by subordinate schools, appears in a note just below the title and the byline of the article’s infantry captain and warrant officer authors. The note warns, “The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent current army doctrine.”
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20
According to the historical overview, Marine snipers in World War II “contributed little to the war effort.”
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21
The number of targets and rounds fired varied with time and weapons. Generally, point standards for qualifications were the same as those used later in Trainfire qualification: expert at least 90 percent, sharpshooter at least 75 percent, and marksman at least 60 percent.
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22
Artillery and air support are designed for use against large, massed enemy forces. Artillery shells and bombs are not meant to be “point” weapons, like rifles, to be aimed at individuals, but rather they are “area” weapons, designed to inflict casualties or damage in a large space.
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23
Limited use of scoped rifles by U.S. advisers and Central Intelligence Agency operatives preceded the arrival of the regular Marine units. At least one former adviser, who prefers to remain unidentified, claims more than a dozen enemy kills using a scoped rifle during the early years of American support of South Vietnam. Those marksmen, however, had no central organization or training, and their role remained extremely minor.
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24
Exact dates of certain events in the early formation of Marine snipers are imprecise. Many official letters and messages, often not written until “after the fact,” never made their way into the official archives or have been lost or misplaced since the war. It is also noteworthy that most official after-action reports focus on battalion and larger units. The small number of Marines who began the sniper program in Vietnam simply did not merit mention in most official records and correspondence. Personal recollections about the dates of sniper development in Vietnam are at times in conflict, and most refer to months instead of exact dates.
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25
These first sniper rifles to reach Vietnam were .30-caliber weapons with heavy barrels and marksman stocks specifically designed for competition shooting. Additional information on sniper rifles and equipment appears in Appendix A “Sniper Rifle Systems Used in Vietnam.”
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26
“Little notice” can actually be considered a positive achievement of that early sniper training. Things that were not going well in Vietnam tended to receive more attention from military commanders and from the press than those programs that were operating successfully.
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27
Additional information on the development and contents of this manual can be found in Chapter 11 “Training and Organization.”
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28
The others were the 25th Infantry Division, stationed in Hawaii, which soon followed the 173rd to Vietnam, and the 193rd Infantry Brigade, which remained in Panama for the entire war to provide security for the Panama Canal.
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29
U.S. Army field and technical manuals are updated and republished every two to ten years, depending on changes and advances made in the particular field covered by a manual. A notation on the inside cover of each new issue states. “This manual supe
rsedes [the name and date of the previous edition].” Between new editions, the army publishes updates with their effective dates and designates the changes as “C 1,” “C 2,” etc.
Inside the Crosshairs Page 28